The Leading Role of Manufacturing in China’s Regional Economic Growth

China has experienced fast industrialization and long-lasting economic growth since the end of the 1970s. However, the manufacturing sector is not evenly distributed over the Chinese territory, which resulted in an unequal economic development across regions. The aim of this article is to measure whether Kaldor’s engine of growth hypothesis holds true in the case of the Chinese regions over 1996–2006. We believe this is an appropriate model for this country given that manufacturing still represents around half of the Chinese gross domestic product. In order to obtain more reliable results, our approach pays attention to the endogeneity of our explanatory variables, heteroscedasticity, and spillovers effects across regional economies by means of spatial econometric techniques and the spatial heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent estimator.